I admit it’s kinda silly to pick on two little-known works, but it still bears saying. For the most part, “AMW” comes off like the world’s longest perfume commercial—all empty emoting and off-centre blocking. As for “USA,” it’s commonly known that Godard shot it simultaneously with “Two or Three Things I Know About Her.” Having seen both films, it’s obvious which film his heart was into and which one it was not. A general and most unbecoming “Can I Go Now?” weariness pervades in Anna Karina’s performance as well.

That having been said, both of the films do hold some value. “AMW” holds interest primarily as a toolbox of thematic ideas and concepts Godard & Co would mine for the next few years. It also features a brilliant montage of photos and drawings from a fashion magazine set to a Sylvie Vartan song. Speaking of music, Marianne Faithfull’s deservedly famous cameo in “USA” is a must-see, as is the final scene, which turns the faults of Karina’s characterization inside-out, making for one last great moment in her feature career w/ Godard (I haven’t seen the short “Anticipation” yet.)

I watched Le Mepris (Contempt) last night, for the third time. Colin MacCabe has called it the greatest European work of art since WWII. I can't see that; not even sure it's the greatest Godard picture of 1963. Anyone else?

Alphaville. Watching it for the first time in a decade - that strange kind of home-made collage effect of Orwellian dystopia, hard-boiled detectives, computer capitalism. It reminds me of Brecht's consciously half-baked fantasies of America, in its feeling of making it up as it goes along - a sort of experiment in imagination, trying to see what happens if you treat Paris as Alphaville and these scenes as happening in an improbably distant future.

Eh, its sexist because Michel idolizes old Hollywood gangster films and is idiot enough to think them a model of how to treat women. I don't know if that makes the film itself sexist, but what my latest viewing drove home was that I've grown up enough that I can no longer find an angle at which that might be charming.

People often tell me that Lola was brilliantly shot. “Was it due to your own mood?” they ask. “Or to Demy? Or the light of Nantes? Or the look of Anouk Aimée?” It was partly all of these things, but first and foremost, and above everything else, the images of Lola came from the film stock – Gevaert 36, which the factory has now stopped making. So I have never been able to recapture those unsaturated blacks, those extraordinary whites, that grainy texture of real and unreal which in my opinion accounted for at least 70 per cent of the lyricism of Lola.

"There's a song by Leonard Cohen that goes: 'I came so far for beauty/I left so much behind/My patience and my family/My masterpiece unsigned'. This is what I've said for myself. And I have the feeling that it's all new again."